Why I’m starting this site

In 2022, there were two guide robots in the lobby of a university hospital I visited regularly. Over several months, I never once saw anyone use them. At some point, all I saw was the robots waiting at their charging spots, with nothing to do.

In 2024, I attended a briefing held by one of Korea’s largest robotics companies. During a break, I asked an employee how big the product design team was. The employee tilted their head and said it wasn’t really a team: one designer designed the exterior of a robot once its development was finished.

Of course, someone may have used the guide robots when I wasn’t there. And one employee’s answer can’t tell me everything about how that company handles design. But the questions these two scenes left me with became something I wanted to work out.

Robots are everywhere in the conversation. Robots that pick up and move an egg with delicate hand movements, or bound lightly over rough terrain, are presented as things that will change our future. Yet the sight of people actually using such robots in everyday life is still unfamiliar to me.

What else does it take for a robot to become a product that people need and keep using? And what role can industrial designers, who have long worked on physical products, play in that process?

When an industrial designer met robots

I have been an industrial designer for fifteen years. I studied industrial design as an undergraduate and have worked in the field ever since. In graduate school, I studied human–robot interaction (HRI). I didn’t get as close to the technology as I had hoped at the start, but I graduated having designed a cute robot dog and built it as a prototype.

That was when I began to see robots as products. What functions a robot could perform mattered, but I was more curious about what kind of robots people would need, and how it would feel to live with one. With the robot dog in particular, I thought about how design affects the bond that forms between a person and a robot.

I also have a personal hope. Since smartphones arrived, I feel that industrial designers have had less room to work. Even the title “product designer” now mostly refers to people who design apps and digital services. As someone who has designed things you touch with your hands and use with your body, I see in Physical AI the next possibility for the work I have been doing.

If AI moves into the places we live

Once AI has a body and starts moving in the same spaces as people, its size and form, its movement and its responses all shape the user experience. If it is hard to tell what a robot does, or even whether you can talk to it, people may walk past before ever trying what it can do.

Most of this is familiar ground for industrial designers. We have always thought in a “user-centred” way. Looking closely at people’s bodies and behaviour, thinking about the space a product will sit in, and making things people can use without reading a manual: this is what we have long been trained to do.

Still, to bring that experience to robots, designers have to learn too. We need to understand what robots share with the products we have designed so far and where they differ, and what a robot can sense and how it can move. A form that looks awkward to use may have a technical reason behind it. Only by knowing these conditions can we propose designs that give people the experience they need and can actually be built.

What we’ll talk about here

Here, I want to look at Physical AI design in terms of products that people actually use. Even a robot that moves impressively in a demo video raises plenty of questions before you bring it into your home or workplace. Is it better than the tools you already use? Is it worth the price? Is looking after it more trouble than it’s worth? It needs a reason to keep being used after the novelty wears off.

Looking at new robots, and at robots that have disappeared into history, one at a time, I want to talk about what needs they set out to meet and what felt convenient or inconvenient when people actually used them. I also want to hear what engineers, marketers and founders wrestled with while making these products, and what the people who used them experienced. I hope this becomes a place where engineers and founders can better understand what difference design makes to a product, and where designers can learn what they need to know to work on Physical AI.

The same questions come to mind when I think of those robots in the hospital lobby. Did people know what the robots were for? Were they something the people who came there actually needed?

Between the people who make robots and the people who use them, I want to take on these questions one at a time.